“Don’t wait for me,” he said.
“I wasn’t going to.”
Matthias smiled coldly and passed some time glancing around the room. Most people were exactly what he’d expect in a hotel like this…except for one guy over in the corner who looked seriously out of place: He was wearing a suit that was cut better than everybody else’s, and seemed dated even to the fashionless eye.
Hell, the getup might have been worn to a flapper party—or maybe back in the Roaring Twenties themselves—
As if sensing he was being looked at, the man lifted his eyes with an aristocratic air.
Matthias refocused on his dining companion. Dee was going at her food with precise cuts of her fork, the thin edge pushing easily through the scrambled and the hash.
“Sometimes not remembering is a good thing,” she said.
Yeah, he thought, he had a feeling that was especially true in his case. God, if that story Jim had fed him was—
“And I didn’t mean to be evasive about my father,” she said. “It’s just…he’s nothing I like to think about.” Her fork drifted down to settle on the plate as she stared out the window. “I’d do anything to forget him. He was…a violent man—an evil, violent man.”
With a quick shift, her stare came back to his and locked on. “Do you know what I’m talking about. Matthias—”
Abruptly, another one of those headaches came from out of nowhere, barging through his thought processes and zeroing in on his temples, twin shots of pain heating up on either side of his skull.
Dimly, he saw that Dee’s perfect red mouth was moving, but the words weren’t reaching him; it was as if he had pulled out of his body, even as his flesh stayed where it was…and then the very interior of the restaurant began to recede, sure as if the walls had hinged loose and fallen outward, morphing all Inception-like until suddenly he wasn’t sitting in a Marriott’s pseudo-fancy eatery anymore, but somewhere else—
He was on the second floor of a farmhouse, rough wood planking marking the floors, walls, and ceiling. The stairwell in front of him was steep, the banister made from pine that had darkened to the color of tar from the oils of countless hands having gripped it.
The air was stale, and stuffy, although it wasn’t hot.
Matthias looked behind himself, into a room that he recognized as his own. The twin bed had mismatched blankets and no pillows…the bureau had scratches on it and pulls that were halfway attached…there was no rug. But on the little table next to where he slept, a brand-new radio with fake wood trim and a silver dial sat pristine and out of place.
Glancing down, he saw he was wearing a ragged pair of pants, and that his feet stuck way out from the rolled-up hems; his hands were the same, oversized compared to his thin forearms, his extremities too big for the rest of his body.
He remembered this stage of his life, knew that he was young. Fourteen or fifteen—
A sound brought his head around.
A man was coming up the stairs. Overalls were dirty; hair was slicked with sweat, as if a hat or a baseball cap had been locked on it for hours; boots were loud.
Big man. Tall man.
Mean man.
His father.
All at once, everything shifted, his consciousness de-coupling from his flesh such that he was no longer able to control the body he was in, the steering wheel having been taken over by someone else.
All he could do was stare out of his eye sockets as his father turned the corner at the head of the stairs and stopped.
The skin on that lean face had been weathered to the point of cowhide, and there was a tooth missing on one side as he smiled like a serial killer.
His father was going to die, Matthias thought. Right here, right now.
However improbable that was, given the difference in their sizes, the man was going to hit the ground and be dead in a matter of moments—
Abruptly, Matthias could feel himself start talking, his lips forming sounds that didn’t register on him. They had an impact on his father, however.
That expression shifted, the smile dissipating, that dental gap disappearing as the thin mouth flattened. Rage narrowed those electric blue eyes, but it didn’t last. Shock was next. As if something that he had been confident about now seemed less than certain.
And all the while, Matthias kept talking, slow and consistently.
This was where it had all started, he thought to himself: this man, this evil man who he’d lived alone with for too long, this sick bastard who had “raised” him. Now was the time for reckoning, however, and his younger self felt nothing as he spoke the words he did, knowing full well that he was finally caging the monster.
His father’s hand grabbed onto the front of the overalls, right over his heart, crushing the material, the dirty, chipped nails digging in.
And still Matthias kept talking.
Down to the floor. His father went down on his knees, his free palm thrown out to the banister, his mouth cranking open so wide that the other missing teeth, the ones in the back, showed.
He had never expected to get caught. That was his killer.
Well…technically, the myocardial infarction was what did him in. But the proximal cause was the fact that their ugly secret was out.
Death took its own sweet time.
As his father flopped over on his back, his hand now shifting to his left armpit as if it hurt like a bitch, Matthias stood where he was and watched the dying process roll in and take over. Apparently, breathing was difficult, that chest chugging up and down without much effect: Beneath the tan, his father’s color was receding.
When the view switched back to the bedroom, Matthias realized that he had turned away and was walking, going over to the radio, sitting down, turning it on. He could still see his father struggling like a fly on a windowsill, limbs contracting this way and that, head arching back as if he thought maybe a different angle would help increase the oxygen flow.
But it wasn’t going to help. Even a fifteen-year-old farm boy knew that if your heart wasn’t pumping, your brain and vital organs were going to starve no matter how many deep breaths you took.
Out on the prairie, they got only five stations and three were religious. The other two played country and pop, and he twisted the dial, going back and forth between the pair. From time to time, just because he knew his father was going to meet his Maker sometime soon, he let a sermon ring out.
Matthias felt nothing other than frustration that he couldn’t get hard rock to play. Seemed like Van Halen was a better match to his father’s kicking it than Conway f**king Twitty or Phil f**king Collins.